XPCA

Welcome

The aim of this site is to explore new ways to think about industrial process control architectures.

We’re taking inspiration from the way the Atom Syndication Format and Publishing Protocol community have been able to coordinate their efforts in developing their standards and specifications. Like the Atom community, our goal is to use this site to develop clear and concise specifications that may be implemented and extended by everyone. We’re inviting anyone who is interested to share their ideas and work together to create novel approaches to industrial process control.

We believe there are opportunities to simplify process control; and to build better connections between engineering and business systems.

Background

You can read some of our initial thinking in the original REST-PCA proposal. XPCA (eXtensible Process Control Architecture) represents an effort to structure those initial ideas into a set of architectural elements.

Getting Involved

The best place to start is possibly the XPCA Google Group. It’s a low volume mailing list at present, so we’re always looking for more input.

We’re also looking for contributions to the XPCA-Spec document set. These documents are intended to add a level of formality around the XPCA standards and specifications, capturing the ideas that come out of discussions with other members of the XPCA team - as well as providing a model for refining those ideas. XPCA-Spec borrows/steals heavily from the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) model used to direct innovation with the Python community.

It’s early days, and we have no shape in mind other than to explore these ideas. Let your interests drive the discussion and we’ll see what comes of it.

Guiding Principles

1. Reuse over reinvention

The world is awash with great ideas. Use existing conventions and technologies in preference to inventing new ones.

2. Recipes over regulation

Other Sites

We’ve been following the RESTduino project as it parallels some of the ideas we’ve been having in this space.